How does a product that doesn't compete with anything Apple makes somehow challenge them? If I sell pull-knit sweaters, and Apple doesn't offer anything in that market, have I somehow stolen a run on them?

I don't think that OS/X ever had official atom support to start with. The interesting question is this caused by intent or because Apple didn't test the update on an Atom. Of course they have no reason to test the update on an Atom because they do not sell a single computer that uses the Atom.

Not exactly. I have been programing for a long time. Way back when the PII came out our application blew up. We used Borland Pascal and there was an issue with the CRT.o unit that blew up on the Intel PII. At the OS level the Atom is not 100% identical with the Core2Duo, P4, i7, or AMD line. It is possible that their is a bug that only happens on the Atom and Apple didn't test for it because they do not support the Atom or plan on supporting the Atom with this OS.You think that they did this to be a pain but to be honest if they where going to do this then why not break all hackintoshs and not just netbooks?They may have done it intentionally or it could just be a side effect that they didn't test for and frankly don't need to test for.What I am saying that I can not say why it happened or what exactly did happen. But then nobody outside of Apple can know for sure.But since Apple never officially supported any none Apple hardware it seems funny that people are saying that they officially stopped supporting Atom netbooks.

Even saying it "breaks Atom support" is perhaps a little inaccurate. There has never officially been Atom support in OSX. It just happened to work. Now it happens to not work. Maybe it was intentional on their part, but it was never "official".

Latest stunt? WTF?! What makes you think Apple owes it to you to support hardware they don't even use in their products?

I could see getting pissy if they stopped supported all but a couple specific Core 2 Duo chips but Atom was never officially supported in the first place.

I like my Macbook and my Hackintosh desktop but I don't think they owe it to me to support my hardware. They don't support it and I don't expect them to help but if they tried to sue me for running OS X on a PC, I'd be angry but this i

It's funny as someone with an aging MacBook Pro, I was contemplating passing it down to my wife, claiming her netbook, installing osx86 on it, and then picking up a new Mac desktop, either an iMac or a Mac Pro, and just standardizing on OSX throughout the house.

Now I wonder if I'm better off just installing Ubuntu on the MBP and the Netbook and spend a lot less money on the desktop and build myself one with Ubuntu as well.

I'm not totally stating that this has caused Apple a hardware sale, (at least not yet)

OS X vs Ubuntu have not only entirely different target audiences but are entirely different experiences. I use XP, OSX Tiger, RHEL 5 and Fedora 8 daily but switching my laptop from OSX Tiger to Fedora or RHEL would be a huge difference in capabilities and would greatly reduce my performance -- until I found replacements for all the things I do, assuming that's possible.

And please before you tag me as not friendly to open source, I've been using Fedora since it was called Red Hat 5.2. Just make absolutely sure you are willing to put up with the change in scenery... Ubuntu tends to be a rather cutting-edge distro. Hope it works for you.

There is a difference between leaving in support and explicitly disabling "support". I put support in quotes because there was never anything extra done to support atom, it just acts like a normal processor. This si like websites which look at your browsers user agent and deny you access because you are running the wrong browser, when the page would run in the blocked browser anyway.

There is a difference between leaving in support and explicitly disabling "support". I put support in quotes because there was never anything extra done to support atom, it just acts like a normal processor. This si like websites which look at your browsers user agent and deny you access because you are running the wrong browser, when the page would run in the blocked browser anyway.

They are not "explicitly disabling 'support'" and they were never "leaving in support." As you said, they never did anything to support Atom, and now they've coincidentally broken it. Just like when a website starts using a JavaScript function that breaks in Opera/Safari/Chrome because it was never tested on that browser.

You haven't read through the previous comments, have you? I see far more people (at least at this point) complaining about the anti-apple comments than anti-apple comments...

Now, with that said, I think it's genius what they are doing from a business perspective... Making the software an beacon to their hardware profit center. From a moral perspective, I don't care what they do, cause I'm not spending $3k on a MacBook Pro... OSX may be amazing, but I am quite happy with Ubuntu, so this news has no consequence for me. If you want the freedom to do what you choose, use a free OS (Linux flavors, BSD flavors, etc). If you want the polished yet non-free OSs (OSX, Windows), then you have to live with the restrictions... It's as simple as that. They own the copyright on the OS, so they can tell you how they want you to use it. You can argue about the moral implications of what they do all day long, all it does is keep their name in the news...

Hackintosh users can live without the 10.6.2 update. This doesn't really break anything, it just prevents netbook users from having the latest set of OS patches between now and whenever the community finds a workaround.

Hackintosh users doesn't need to live without 10.6.2 update: make a copy of 10.6.1 kernel, install 10.6.2, DON'T REBOOT, rename new kernel to kernel10.6.2, rename old 10.6.2 kernel again, reboot. The hackintosh user will have everything updated except the kernel. you can even use new and updated kexts made for the new kernel... You can also a small patch on source code and have kenel 10.6.2 but it's a little bit of work for a tiny hackintosh:

I'm guessing that, since the actual kernel is open source [apple.com] that they are doing some additional check further up the chain in a non-open source module. Otherwise wouldn't it be trivial to do a diff, search for the code that checks for the stepping, and if it's an Atom, call exit(0)?

Apple doesn't make an Atom-based Mac. Nor did they in the past. They explicitly sell and license Mac OS X to run only on Macs. If you want to try and get it to work on a non-Mac with a different CPU and/or chipset than what Apple supports, you're on your own, good luck to you.

Apple isn't going to send an army of lawyers to your house to stop you from trying to build a hackintosh. They will if you figure it out and then start selling them - see Psystar for details. But they won't do anything to make it easy for you to build a hackintosh, and if it breaks - oh well, sucks to be you, next time buy a Mac or stick to a supported OS on your hackintosh.

Me, I stick to Windows 7 Pro on my eee901 for now, but I may switch to eeebuntu soon. I like it. I'll keep Mac OS on my Macs.

eee k. thank you, mr. apple spokesman who posts on/. with his real name in his sig. brilliant!!!11

I like my real name and my online persona. They're one and the same. I prefer that to "l33td00d1" or Anonymous Coward. If you don't mind saying what you actually think, there's no reason to be an AC here, and handles have never really been my thing either. Been around long enough to not give a damn, either - as my UID here might point out.

And I'm not an Apple anything, though in my consulting business I and my employees work about half on Macs and half on Windows. I'm Apple-certified because that's a r

What I find ironic is that there is more fuss being made about support for Atom processors than PowerPC processors, and Apple even made PowerPC based computers. Once could also complain about the lack of 68k support, but probably most people don't remember back that far.

Maybe if "any other company" had sold the product explicitly with Atom support and then reneged on that promise.

AFAICT the argument from the whiners is "Even though OS X is explicitly sold with strings attached which make it hard for me to legally build a hackintosh, it shouldn't be because I don't like it and any attempt to enforce such strings, no matter how feeble such an attempt may be, is nasty!"

Actually, I doubt that.... The computer industry has a LONG reputation of building OS's that only run with specific hardware configurations sold by the OS vendor. Until the idea of a "PC clone" came along, this was pretty much how ALL personal computers were sold. (You weren't going to get your Commodore 64 to run anything written for the Atari 800, and your TI99/4A didn't work with any of those, OR a computer from Radio Shack....) SPARC machines ran their own operating systems too. (I think Intergraph had to sell a special port of Windows NT for them, to get them to run that.)

Certainly, the minicomputers and mainframes out there all ran their own proprietary OS's too.

The Atom includes SSE3, but Intel's compilers require a special switch to generate SSE3 compatible code for the Intel Atom. So I would assume there is something "special" about SSE3 on the Atom.

So, possibility one is that Apple is explicitly saying that they want to crush these people making Hackintosh Netbooks. Possibility two is that Apple is now using instructions that are not available on the Intel Atom because they don't make an Intel Atom-based machine and would rather optimize their code for the machines that they do make.

i think it was intentional and i'm totally OK with that. Apple is protecting their business model by excluding hardware they dont sell. their selling their pretty hardware made it possible for them to write their pretty software. i think you hit the nail on the head by blaming Psystar. Apple probably couldnt care less about the few of us that have modded our own netbooks to run OSX especially if we have a purchased copy of the OS. even those that torrented it pro

Why? Psystar doesn't build machines with Atom processors. More likely this is to kill the netbook OS X market, so that that group of uses will be desperate for something in a similar form factor when Apple releases the iTablet.

I'm curious if apple even has the legal right to restrict installation to apple hardware.

If it's presented after purchase, then you are not obliged to agree to it.

Yet if the store you're supposed to return it to says "all sales final" then wouldn't apple be on the hook for handling refunds of the "refused to consent to the EULA" variety

The MacOS X retail package has a note "sale is subject to acceptance of the license". A sale only happens when both sides agree that it happens. And since Apple doesn't agree to the sales contract unless you accept the license, there is no sale up to that point. No sale, no license, no right to do anything.

And of course Apple is on the hook for refunds if you don't agree to the license. That is what Apple itself says; they say that they will refund your money, as long as either (1) you didn't break the seal on software that was accompanied by a printed license, or (2) the software was not sealed or not accompanied by a printed license, and it is not installed on your computer.

My copy of 10.6 was neither sealed nor accompanied by a printed license, so I would have fully expected to get my money back if I didn't accept the license. On the other hand, without accepting the license there is no purchase (until you accept the license, you just hold a box that belongs to Apple, and Apple holds some money that belongs to you).

You seem to be operating under the premise that Apple is a Software company like Microsoft. They're not. They're a hardware company like HP or Dell. That the operating system they provide with their hardware is their own creation is irrelevant, and they're under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to provide support for any platform that they didn't sell.

That they're disabling support for the Atom platform is irrelevant. They're disabling support for a platform that they don't sell. The EULA that comes with their software specifically prohibits your using that platform in the first place, so if you were using their software legitimately, it shouldn't affect you. If it does affect you, too bad.

Microsoft ended up in hot water for tying a !@#$ing BROWSER to their operating system and everyone cheered for their defeat. If Apple's market share wasn't so comparatively small, they'd be torn to shreds by the DOJ over this.

And that's what happens when you become a monopoly. Some previously permissible behaviors are no longer. If Microsoft wasn't a monopoly they'd not have had a legal problem. Besides, they didn't get torn to shreds by the DOJ. Their wrists were slapped.

1. They illegally tied the sale of Windows to the sale of MS-DOS, a product which they had a number of legitimate competitors for.2. When they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they voluntarily settled rather than go to court. Part of their settlement was they would never ever tie their products together in that way again.3. They then loosely tied IE (an existing product with an existing competitor) into Windows 95.

On the reverse side of this coin, as much as we might have liked it if they had, Apple has never really had a legitimate competitor to their hardware or OS. The only "Mac clones" that were ever legally sold were still licensed by Apple. Additionally, they've never explictly agreed not to tie their products together in order to avoid a spanking from the Department of Justice.

I'm not a particular fan of Apple, the company is just as arrogant as MS. And though I haven't seen as much unethical behavior (just agressive asshattery) from them as from MS, they still stomp all over the consumer and their rights as a matter of routine.

That said, comparing MS's antitrust trials to Apples current situation shows either a lack of perspective and history or a talent at hyperbole.

and although i repeat what hundreds have said before me, you are creating a strawman. nobody wants apple to support intel atom processors and there is no way their eula can tell me what to do with an osx cd in my own home. people who buy an osx cd and install the software on their own netbooks have done nothing morally wrong.

they are perfectly allowed to disable support for whatever they want to. i'm not saying (and i don't think anybody is saying) that apple doesn't have the right to do that. what o

How are they obligated to ensure that their product continues to work on a processor that they do not support? Why are they obligated to ensure the OS X hackintosh community can continue installing OS X on Atom-powrred netbooks?

they aren't and they aren't. but that's not what this argument is about.

the problem is that it is a generally not nice thing to do. many people (i am not one of them, as i would not sully my hands with os x) have quite happily installed os x on intel atom powered products and (presumably) enjoyed using the hardware with this operating system. for apple to deliberately disable their systems from working is just not nice. what harm is it doing apple? why do they have to say to these (presumably hundreds if not thousands of people) "we don't like what you're doing so we're going to make sure you can't!"? it's just small-minded, egocentric behaviour which would get a reprimand if a child did it.

for apple to deliberately disable their systems from working is just not nice.

But they didn't disable anyone's systems from working, all they did was prevent them from updating to the next version of OS X. As long as the netbook Hackintoshers use their current version of OS X, their machines will continue to work. There's no legitimate reason--ethical, legal or otherwise--that Apple should be obligated to continue supporting a processor they don't use in any of their own products.

Well, that is if you agree with Stallman, and what you're saying is that holding Apple to Stallman's ethics because it "represents a legitimate and influential school of thought" is equivalent to me being held to a Christian's ethics because they have decided that doing something with your body is "morally wrong" (wanking, sex before marriage, abortion) and they also "represent a legitimate and influential school of thought".

The problem is the Atom supports a similar instruction set to the standard processors.

Dropping support in this case means they are adding explicit code designed solely to prevent use on a processor the OS would otherwise work with.

And you know this how? There is zero evidence to support this. The much more likely scenario is that something simply broke compatibility with the Atom chipset, and Apple never bothered to test it and doesn't care that it's broken.

It's more about "user experience" than anything else. They don't want to allow OSX to run on anything other than their hardware, because some cheap chipset might make the whole thing malfunction and users would be fast to blame apple for a bad product... Even though it would be the user at fault for not respecting the hardware specifications...

I'm not concerned with it, because I don't plan on running OS X on anything other than an expensive computer sold by apple. And since I have no desire to spend on such a frivolous thing, the plans happily sort themselves out.

The user experience Apple truly cares about is the one where the user pays apple a large sum of money. Everything else merely facilitates t

Not completely. Sure, Apple is a *business* and as such, they're very interested in turning a good profit.

But to say they don't really care about the "user experience" as long as they rake in a lot of money? There are FAR too many facts that refute it to genuinely make that claim.

I'll give you just one story from last week. A woman I know convinced her best female friend to purchase an Apple Macbook, when she was in the market for a new laptop last year. (She already owned an iMac she was really pleased with, and wanted her friend to switch to Mac too so they'd be running the same type of computer, not have all the potential virus or spyware issues, etc.)

Well, unfortunately, her friend isn't very computer literate in the first place, and on top of that, it seems her Macbook's chicklet keyboard had an issue with one of the letter keys sticking occasionally. She managed to screw all sorts of things up that were simply user-error (locked herself out of visiting any web sites while trying to play with the parental controls feature, for example), and kept getting frustrated. The Apple store was a good 1 1/2 hour drive away from her house, making matters worse. When she did vist, the Genius Bar people helped straighten out her software issues... but she was still upset about the sticking keyboard key. They had her mail it back to Apple for service at that point, but for some reason, Apple shipped it back without her issue being addressed.

So at THIS point, despite it all being relatively minor stuff - she was PISSED at Apple and their products and service. She stormed back to the Apple store to complain about the repair not being done properly, and you know what? They "bent some rules" for her, and swapped her for a BRAND NEW Macbook Pro which had more RAM, a better graphics card, faster processor and more drive space than her low-end Macbook that was just out of the 1 year warranty!

Now she's finally "seen the light" on Apple customer service, and is buying an iMac as her next desktop machine at Xmas time.

There's a reason Apple consistently gets top ratings in magazines like Consumer Reports for customer service. They screw things up like ALL companies do, but they're known for resolving issues to people's satisfaction, eventually... not just saying "Sucks to be you!" or wasting hours of your time on hold with someone who can't speak your language very well, reading off a card to you.

So at THIS point, despite it all being relatively minor stuff - she was PISSED at Apple and their products and service. She stormed back to the Apple store to complain about the repair not being done properly, and you know what? They "bent some rules" for her, and swapped her for a BRAND NEW Macbook Pro which had more RAM, a better graphics card, faster processor and more drive space than her low-end Macbook that was just out of the 1 year warranty!

OK, I happily grant that a stuck key is a major issue. But giving her a new MacBook Pro as compensation for the Apple repair department's failure to fix the key is phenomenal customer service any way you slice it.

Let us know what happens next time you have a stuck key on your Dell (or whatever). I'll bet they will not give you a new Adamo.

Call me a fanboy if you want, but you might be interested to know that I just bought my first Mac (literally) four days ago. So, either I can't be a fanboy, or you must co

Counterpoint: They sell Unix-based systems with UI infrastructure and frameworks that kick the tar out of what's available on Windows or Linux, which have actual third-party support for a breadth of (gasp) commercial software, and which has a large, healthy native FOSS community. Oh, and which can run virtually all *nix-based FOSS software I've cared to look as well.

And just for a data point, look up the stats on a Dell Studio 13 compared to the current Macbook. They're nearly identical. Price, disk, RAM

Not necessarily, although a combination of funny and insightful would probably be appropriate.

Not all people who buy Apple products are out to fluff their ego, just like not all people who buy Dells are too dumb to assemble their own from whitebox parts, or all people who run Linux are too cheap to spend money on an OS.

Huge generalisations really help no one. Regardless of your personal opinion on the "Apple experience", there really is something to it for some people - I personally love having a machine (w

... because some cheap chipset might make the whole thing malfunction and users would be fast to blame apple for a bad product...

I'm sure that has nothing at all to do with it. What's actually happening is that Apple is the sole supplier of computers that can run OSX out of the box and it wants to make sure things remain that way. It's simply a matter of Apple maintaining a profitable hardware monopoly.

OS X was never meant to be compatible on that hardware, and hackers have to use all sorts of tricks to get it to run. I looked into it myself, at one point. It wasn't a trivial procedure, even then.

As for your use of the word monopoly, it's essentially meaningless. Many companies have a "monopoly" on the particular product they sell, in the sense that they're the only supplier of that particular product. And many companies go to great lengths to protect the unique nature of their product. You've defined th

You used it. You've been around here long enough to know better than to try mis-using a term of art to make a point. Suck it up, low-UID-boy.:-p

The important point is that OSX is tied to Apple hardware through artificial means, and that Apple does this in order to protect its position as the sole supplier of hardware that can run OSX without the need to circumvent Apple's anti-competitive technical measures.

Ah, the meat of the argument (you'll note that I said essentially the same thing somewhere up there, but without the moral pissiness). So here's my question.

Nowhere does the article say "Jailbroken", even though the worm only targets jailbroken, non-officially sanctioned stuff that lives outside Apple's cage. This is an open and shut case of Apple's hardware getting blamed for something the hobbyist hack community does. An IT manager who's considering brining iPhone's into the business might read the article, not go the extra mile to find out the exploit's for jailbroken phones only, decide that iPhones are not secu

>hey don't want to allow OSX to run on anything other than their hardware,

They dont. They sue people who sell OSX based machines. This update targets hobbyists and techies who know what they are doing and who dont need Apple's hand holding for "user experience" as you put it. Open your eyes already. Its embarrassing to see a place like slashdot that supposedly is all about the DIY ethic defending bullshit actions by one of technology's most controlling and DRM friendly companies.

Although I understand that argument, I really believe that this type of behaviour is holding back Apple. I think that OSX CAN be a huge threat to Windows, if they allowed it to be installed on any PC. I would imagine that many people would LOVE to ditch Windows and install OSX on their Dell laptops. The MacBooks are too expensive compared with other laptops, which is why a lot of people just suck it up and buy a Dell with Windows.

I must be unfamiliar with the x86 architecture. Can you explain to me how blacklisting x86 devices as opposed to other x86 devices "tightens the code and all that"?

Maybe they should just build a white list that checks the firmware of the motherboard to make sure that the device is an approved "user experience" device before booting? I mean, they're suing Psystar when they could just let the problem take care of itself, right?

In my opinion what Apple is doing is bad for the market and bad for end

They should explicitly state their product's system requirements and let the consumer decide (like everyone else).

From the Snow Leopard Tech Specs:

General requirementsMac computer with an Intel processor

Only Apple makes Macs and Apple does not make any product with the Atom processor. Therefore, no computer with the Atom is supported. Neither is any computer with an AMD procesor. Or any computer not made by Apple, since all Mac clones are over ten years old and used PowerPCs.

None of those computers are supported. The fact that it works on some of them is a happy coincidence. There it is, written clearly in the very first requirement.

I think the complaint is that the requirement for a Mac computer is a business requirement for Apple to make money, not a technical requirement in order to run the software, except in so much as Apple cripples their software (from the end-user's perspective) in order to achieve their business goals.

I'm pulling this out of my nether regions, but the last slashdot article implied that they didn't "disable" Atom processors, per se. They turned on compiler optimizations that generate instructions that the Atom doesn't support.

If that's the case, it "tightens the code" because the new instructions run faster on the Intel processors Apple actually uses. However, Atom no longer works because the cheaper processors don't support those instructions.

Looking at Wikipedia, it looks like the Atom doesn't support SSE4.1. If you wanted to optimize your program for a Core 2 Duo, you'd turn on your SSE4.1 compiler flags. I'm sure there's a lot of other stuff, too - they took a lot of stuff out of the Atom to make it power efficient.

Actually, they would have had to add more code to disable the specific processor in question.

You see, the Atom is an X86 (or, on some, X86-64) based processor, so they didn't have to change their code at all for it to work on it in the first place. Now, they must look at the Processor ID and specifically disable support.

Wah... oh well, sooner or later people will look at the price of their preferred genuine Apple portable, divide it by the number of hours they spend hacking to keep things working every time there is a point update, subtract a bit for general annoyance, come up with a single-digit hourly figure, and if they have half a brain they'll just use Linux.

Or if they're not capable of working that out they'll just post whiny little messages on Slashdot about how their freedoms are being repressed by the big bad company that chose not to support hardware they don't even ship.

ARTHUR: Please, please good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?
WOMAN: No one live there.
ARTHUR: Then who is your lord?
WOMAN: We don't have a lord.
ARTHUR: What?
DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
ARTHUR: Yes.
DENNIS: But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.
ARTHUR: Yes, I see.
DENNIS: By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,--
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: --but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--
ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
WOMAN: Order, eh -- who does he think he is?
ARTHUR: I am your king!
WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you.
ARTHUR: You don't vote for kings.
WOMAN: Well, how did you become king then?
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!
DENNIS: Listen -- strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Well you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: I mean, if I went around saying I was an empereror just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
ARTHUR: Shut up! Will you shut up!
DENNIS: Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
ARTHUR: Shut up!
DENNIS: Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!
ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!
DENNIS: Oh, what a give away. Did you here that, did you here that, eh? That's what I'm on about -- did you see him repressing me, you saw it didn't you?

You do realize that OS X comes bundled with 100's of 'free' open source utilities/apps, right?

You do realize that I can get all the same shit for free for Windows with Services for Unix, right? It's not bundled so that you're not forced to receive it if you don't want it, but it's a free download.

Further, you do realize that Apple is abysmal at keeping up with updates on that Open Source stuff, so that it's almost always outdated and thus often useless anyway, right? And in fact creates security holes that they do not see fit to address?

I'm sure you do, but your assertion that "OS X is even more locked down than Windows" is a little bit a stretch, surely. How much of the Windows source is open? How much of OS X? Clearly both are closed OSes, but the core of OS X is a lot more open than Windows.

On the second point, some citations would be nice. Apple is moaned at a lot for their contributions to the OSS community and their "theft" from it (funny, I thought it was free) especially in cases like Webkit/KHTML and Darwin itself.

So, what currently unaddressed security hole exists in the open source stuff Apple ships? Are you claiming that Apple doesn't update the OSS stuff it ships in security updates? Are you claiming they specifically ignore security holes?

What's to stop you from rolling your own implementations of these vulnerable services on OS X if they are open source and you need to run them but are concerned that the shipped Apple version is insecure, assuming that the current OSS version has also been patched, or are you claiming that because Apple doesn't push a patch down on OS X the very same day a patch to the OSS stuff is done by a third party because they may need to test it on their internal OS X builds first that they are "abysmal at keeping up to date".

True Apple doesn't always keep all of the bundled OSS apps updated... OTOH they don't prevent you from compiling and installing (or finding pre-compiled) an updated version. I rarely use the bundled versions of PHP, MySQL or Ruby on my Mac.

Just be sure to install them under/usr/local/ or a similar standard but not Apple default location or your next Apple update will wipe them out.

There are a few apps which while OSS are tightly coupled to the OS itself and do not have timely support from their original ma

You do realize that OS X comes bundled with 100's of 'free' open source utilities/apps, right?

Do you realize that getting the apps themselves isn't the point?

I can get things like GCC and bash on Linux, Windows, Solaris, OS X and so on.

The difference is in that when something goes wrong, on Linux and OpenSolaris I can debug all the way up to the kernel, while on Windows and OS X I'm stuck if the problem happens to be somewhere in the closed components of the system, and the core system is very unfriendly to

The difference is in that when something goes wrong, on Linux and OpenSolaris I can debug all the way up to the kernel, while on Windows and OS X I'm stuck if the problem happens to be somewhere in the closed components of the system,

Granted, but let's be honest:- have you ever done this?- would you know how to debug the application?- do you believe that you'd be able to just debug the kernel or some complicated framework, understand the coding, write a fix and be sure that it won't break all other applications because your fix breaks some other expected functionality?

I agree that with colsed source, you just can't do it. But let's be honest, for most of us, we still wouldn't do it if we (technically) could because we lack the skills an

Indeed, I like their products and their software seems impressive (discounting itunes on windows). But the cost both in monetary terms and my philosophy on how I feel the world should work, mean that I'll never own an apple product in at least the near future. If they change their philosophy, maybe I'll consider it then.

Amigas had plug-n-play back in 1985. I always find it amusing when Mac or IBM PC users get all excited about stuff I was already doing in the 80s. "Hey look. My OSX can do true preemptive multitasking!" or "My Linux can detect when I plug in my printer!"

Switch your Debian laptop to 640x480 mode. Done? Now change it back to your previous resolution without using some secret keyboard combo. It can't be done because the Desktop Properties window doesn't fit in the 480p height, and therefore no way to mouse-click the "okay" button. I got stuck like that for several hours until finally I said "fuck it" and reinstalled the whole damn OS from a CD.

I seriously doubt that they are actively checking for the Atom processor. More likely an efficiency cut in the code has left out something that the Atom needs to initialize properly. Or possibly the Hackintosh crowd have a bug in their installer that messes this up.